AUS30K upgrade complete!

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Main Blog Author: Dono1979 - 16 February 2015

Welcome to the new AUS30K Admin Blog!

We will be using this blog to communicate a number of things to the users and visitors like upcoming campaigns, events, prizes and competitions as well as announcing upgrades or planned outages (none planned at this point). While I will continue to try and communicate through the forums in which most of you saw the website, it is starting to get difficult to cross post all of the information and not spam the forum posts so often it will be a summary with the link to the most recent blog post.

Thanks to Sirrob01 the site has completed its upgrade to Mediawiki 1.24.1 along with a number of new extensions. While we were hoping to have this upgrade completed some time ago one of the extensions which we were intending on using for the Blog did not function the way we anticipated and resulted in Sirrob01 literally writing his own extension for us to use. Among lots of little things which really only impacted the behind the scenes side of things there were four new major functions added to our site:

Blogs

One of the primary reason for the upgrade was to allow the installation of a Blog function for both the USers and the Admins to be able to use. The Main Blog is reserved for the Admins to post announcements to the general user group, however each User now has access to their Blog functionality through their Userpage. Simply click on your Username at the top right hand of the screen and it will take you there, on the right hand side of your Userpage there will now be a new info box which allows you to create a Blog post and also shows a random post from all of the others that have been created.

Any posts you create will automatically be summarised on your main user page along with a link to the main page. Please feel free to start creating your own posts, however I do request that we keep it relevent to the site and the hobby, it was primarily intended for modelling diaries or tournament summaries etc.

If you need any help regarding this new function please dont hesitate to contact me!


Voting

The other major reason for the upgrade was to install some form of voting element to allow us to run a number of competitions and to also help determine future Global Heresy targets. Currently the Vote function has been applied to all Army Pages and Battle Reports and will automatically be attached to any new ones being created; the format is a simple one click vote to like style.

In the near future we will start making announcements regarding a competition or two focusing on the most popular Battle Report and most popular Army Page. This will be aimed to try and get more and more really interesting pages published and to encourage users to start browsing through other peoples work, there is some really fantastic fluff out there in both the report and army pages! The prizes are yet to be determined but we have some ideas and a couple of generous benefactors who are keen to help things along.

More on the competitions in coming weeks!


Comments

A side effect of the above functions actually gave us an additional function which we were looking into already, the ability to make comments on particular pages. While the Wiki already has this ability through the Discussion page, it is a little clunky and not very intuitive. The Comments plug in now allows users to make comments people Battle Reports and Army Pages simply by scrolling to the bottom of the page and entering their comments into the box provided. Users who would prefer not to have comments available can easily disable the function by removing the line of code.


Social Profile

Another byproduct of the primary functions was the implementation of a Social Profile set, this allows people to upload an avatar, friend/foe other users, message users and latter, once they are setup, the ability to send gifts, accumulate points and ranks similar to regular forums. We will be working on the finer points of the social profile settings in coming weeks and up to have the gifts and ranks setup by the end of the month. For more information on the full raft of abilities the extension details can be found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SocialProfile


In the meantime, please have a look around, let me know if you find any problems and please pass the word! The more users we get who start posting their battle reports and army profiles the bigger the story we will make!

Cheers Dono


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